Sharon Olds is one of the foremost voices in contemporary poetry. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Stag’s Leap and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Strike Sparks, and author of numerous other collections, including Balladz (2022) and Odes, she is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally graphic poems marked by grace, chivalry, and precision. Born in 1942 in San Francisco, Olds grew up a “hellfire Calvinist” in Berkeley, California, attended Stanford University, and earned her PhD from Columbia University. She teaches in the graduate writing program at New York University.

Photograph by Hillery Stone.

Kunitzieform

by Sharon Olds

Did you know T. S. Eliot wore eye shadow
sometimes,
I asked Stanley, and he chuckled—one
gurgle in the bubble chamber
of the spirit level—and his eyes had that sensual
brightness, and his big, fleshless, elegant
hand lifted, and soared over, and dropped,
a couple of times, on the back of my hand, like
being patted by matter. I didn’t
know that,
he musicalled up.
Someone said he’d dust his lids
with green, so someone would say, “Are you
okay, Tom,”
and Stanley said,
It’s a hard way to go about doing that,

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